All Fire Flown
by Assimbya
Summary: AU. Mina visits Lucy's grave.


The graveyard did not look as Mina had imagined it. Foolish as it was, she had somehow pictured Lucy interred within the familiar landscape of the Whitby churchyard, amongst the salt tang of the breeze and the soft murmur of waves and ringing buoys. It was, she now realized, as though she understood Lucy's death as nothing more than the natural climax of that first, unsettling episode of sleepwalking: her white body, lying in fearful stillness across the bench and the world around them frozen with night. Mina recalled the lead-weighted heaviness in her legs as she had climbed the staircase to the Abbey - looking upon Lucy's grave, she thought, would be like that moment lengthened, extended into an eternity, except that the stairs were endless and she would never reach her friend's prone body.

But it was not like that. The Westenra tomb was large and solid, graying and tarnished with age but without the rounded edges of the crumbling gravestones at Whitby. Mina thought, with a shudder, that it looked like a prison. She hated to think of Lucy within it, cut off even in death from the soft earth, from the natural decay that should claim her. The churchyard felt fenced in and restricted. She had brought violets with her, but she drew back from the idea of putting them beside the other rotting flowers which adorned the grim edifice of the tomb.

It was difficult still to believe that, in the brief span of Mina's absence, Lucy's life could have ended so surely and suddenly. Guilt tangled within her and her mind, of its own cruel accord, presented to her, side-by-side, images of Jonathan, eyes red, sweating in fever, and Lucy, pale and weak. She had cared for both of them but, in the end, during the moments when they had most needed her, she had been absent.

The wind rustled among the yew trees. It was dusk, and the sharp sliver of the moon was only faintly visible against the gray of the sky.

"Mina," the wind whispered.

She stepped forward and, reluctantly, laid the violets down upon the tomb.

Someone laid a hand upon her shoulder.

Startled, Mina twisted to look back. Lucy stood behind her, her hair loose over her shoulders, wearing a long dress of white lawn. She did not look ill any longer, though she was paler than Mina had ever seen her, her features hard and sharp-edged against the trees.

"Mina," she repeated, "how glad I am that you've come."

For a moment, Mina wondered hysterically if brain-fever could be catching. But the answer was probably simpler - exhaustion, grief, the unfamiliar fantasia of Jonathan's diary, which was full of ghostly, beautiful women with just this bright, inhuman look in their eyes. It was cruel of her mind to link Lucy's death with Jonathan's ordeal, perverse of it to make her friend into one of those creatures which Jonathan so feared. She stood, and tried to ignore the vision.

"Look at me, Mina," the ghost said.

The ghost had Lucy's voice. Mina looked, and when she met the creature's eyes the world spun around her. It was like being back in Whitby on that night, except this time she was at the top of the stairs, lying upon the bench, and she still could not move.

"It's kind of you," the ghost said, "to bring me fresh flowers. The others are all dying."

Mina could not bear standing still and silent, gazing at the specter. She reached a hand out towards the ghost's cheek. It touched flesh, cold and smooth and soft. She closed her eyes and could still feel Lucy's skin under her fingers. The chill made her want to draw her friend close and wrap a shawl around her, ask her, _Have you been sleepwalking again?_

"I am imagining this," she said, and heard her own voice hoarse in the night.

Lucy laughed, and the laugh was her own bright one but somehow leeched of warmth, of body, until it rattled, glasslike. "Are you, my darling? Or perhaps it is I who am imagining it - I never expected you to come, occupied as you must be with dear Jonathan. Not meant for me, he said."

The words echoed and tangled and wound around one another in Mina's mind. She let her arm fall.

As if in response, Lucy lifted her own hand to Mina's face, running small fingertips across her forehead, nose, lips. "Warm, though. Warm as life. It may be that you _are _real."

Mina could not stand it. She caught Lucy's hand in hers. "They told me you were dead."

"I slept," Lucy said, and Mina could not at first tell whether this was meant as a response, "deeper than I ever had. And when I woke there was nothing but him and the stone. I was never dead." She fixed Mina with a sharp look. "My mother died. Heart stopped, falling on the floor, broken glass around her. Did they tell you _that?_"

They had, though not the detail about the broken glass. Mina was fighting against her desire to believe in this phantom, but her resolve weakened with each word Lucy spoke. She could feel the hand in hers. Could Lucy have be buried alive? Surely not. Could the Professor have lied to her? What reason would he possibly have had to do so?

She said the only thing that she could, in good conscience, say, whether Lucy was alive or dead. "I love you," she told her, "I'm sorry that I wasn't there with you then; I wish I could have been." She swallowed hard. "I'm glad I can see you now, whatever - however that has happened."

Lucy's lips parted. "So warm. So much life, my darling. So what if you _aren't _meant for me?"

Mina tightened her hold upon Lucy's fingers. "Lucy. Lucy, dear, what are you saying?"

"Come to me, Mina." There was an edge of command in Lucy's voice, which made something in Mina's abdomen seize up in a feeling very like desire. Lucy drew Mina towards her by their joined fingers. Their bodies were so close, and Mina could no longer believe that this image of Lucy was a hallucination. Her skin was too alive with feeling for that. Suddenly she shivered. Lucy had placed the hand that was not entwined with her own upon her bare neck, and her fingers were cold. There was a strangeness to the gesture, but Mina could not immediately identify it.

"I will take so little from you," Lucy murmured, "so little that you will hardly notice. And Mina, love, you have so much, kisses enough for him and for Jonathan and for me too -"

_There are kisses for us all._

Mina's calm snapped, and she tried to pull away, but Lucy's fingers, hard as iron, clamped down upon her neck and she could not dislodge them.

"Oh!" Lucy cried out, and her voice sounded so young and distressed that Mina nearly stopped struggling entirely, "Oh, _please _don't fight, Mina, it will hardly hurt. And I cannot keep you calm as he would, I'm trying but I don't yet know _how -_"

It was difficult for Mina to speak; she had to fight to get the words out. "Let go of me; tell me what's going on."

Lucy closed her eyes, as if in frustration. "Be still. Oh, _do _be still."

A haze overcame Mina, and she felt her will easing away from her like water running through a sieve. She stopped fighting. She felt the hand upon her neck move upwards, tugging at her hair, pulling her head down towards her right shoulder. Lucy let go of her hand and placed one arm at the small of Mina's back. Calm poured through her. She thought she had not been so at peace for a long time.

Lucy's face before her, and there was something fearful and disconcerting about her open mouth, but Mina could not name it. The mouth was upon her neck, and longing swelled in her. A hard press at her skin, a sharp, distinct pain - she heard herself crying out, as though from a far distance. And then she could feel nothing but the most intense weakness of her life. _Let me rest, _she thought, _please, someone, let me rest._

Lucy lifted her face away from Mina's neck and licked her lips. Blood. Why was this familiar? What was it that Jonathan had said? She could not _think. _Lucy's eyes were not upon her anymore; it was as though she had forgotten that Mina was there, or that she was a person with whom she could speak. She let go of Mina, who was too weak to stand. She felt herself falling, tried to catch herself, tried to cry out, and could do neither. She fell heavily against the grass. Lucy was turning aside; Lucy was walking away and leaving her there.

(Was this even Lucy, the bright-eyed specter who did such things?)

Mina lay still in the grass. It was almost good to rest, to know that the hazy exhaustion in her bones released her from responsibility and choice. She had been so tired. She thought, distantly, of Jonathan shaking in nightmare. And here she lay, with pain throbbing at her neck, utterly still. She could stay there forever.

The image of Lucy, prone upon the bench, a dark shadow bent over her, returned.

The air, suddenly, was thick with mist.

There was a man there, in the graveyard; Mina could see only his feet and ankles, as they passed her head, moving in a smooth stride towards Lucy's pale, retreating figure. His voice, dusky with an unfamiliar accent, shattered the night. "Fool," he cried, "can I trust you with nothing? She is not for you; I told you this, and you leave her thus outside your own tomb. Do you want to be _killed?"_

Lucy's voice was unmistakable, especially petulant as it now was. "She came to visit _me - _why should you have her?"

Mina could not see what happened then, but she heard Lucy's cry, which was human, and pitiful.

The man's voice again - "You should not dare question me. She is not for you. And if you leave those you drink from here, half dead, then you will soon be found out and murdered. Our kind _can _bekilled. This girl is as likely as any other to drive a stake through your heart. Now leave me to attend to this, and do not again attempt to disobey my commands."

Mina realized, with a sudden and startling flash of clarity, that she recognized this scene, and she knew who the man must be.

She held the knowledge wound tight inside her and did not let it go, even as the man knelt down next to her and she felt as though she was choking on mist.

"Mina Harker," he said, pronouncing her name with a discomfiting familiarity, "we meet rather earlier than I had planned. But, enough. I shall return you tonight to your husband, and you will not speak to him of what has elapsed this evening." He was lifting her in his arms, easily, as though she weighed nothing. "We will see one another again soon enough, under more intimate circumstances."

Mist encircled her, and the graveyard grew distant and indistinct. She was so cold. She thought, with the dull ache of grief, that, whatever this had been, it would surely be the last time she saw Lucy.

A bat fluttered in the branches of the yew tree. She remembered no more.


End file.
